Nabokov on Marxism

 Without its obscurities and abracadabra, without its pernicious reticences, shamanic incantations and magnetic trash, Marxism is not Marxism. The paradox which explodes Marxism and other dreams of the ideal state is that the first author is potentially the first tyrant of that state. . . . The individual whims of a ruler tell deeper truths about a corresponding period than the vulgar generalization of class war etc.; and the peculiar mathematical and historical howlers, in the Capital and capitaloids, are transfigured by the synthesis of Revolution into the beastly cruel stupidities it commits.